How a Book Tour Really Works: a Story in Three Meals

BREAKFAST – SOFITEL ON COLLINS, MELBOURNE
Terence, the guest relations manager, has welcomed you with a hand-written note, chocolates and a fruit platter. You ate most of it the night before, but take the final two chocolates with you as you head to the lift for your morning run, when there’s just enough light outside. On the way out of the hotel, and again half an hour later after your lap of the Tan, the top-hatted concierge greets you by name.

Before you shower, you order the Japanese breakfast to be delivered to your room. It turns out to be perfect, and here’s how it looks.

This is the book tour, right? It’s the book tour fantasy, and it’s true enough, but it’s not the whole story.

LUNCH – BP SERVO, SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE GEELONG
You’re cutting it fine on tour, always. Time is money, not because they’re paying you anything but because everything else costs plenty – you have a publicist on the road, two hotel rooms everywhere you stay, meals, cabs, the author jagging an extra coffee or snack at every opportunity. Field one question too many at the end of an event and the clock’s against you.

You stand with your publicist in the carpark outside a Geelong shopping centre neither of you has ever been to before. There’s a Macca’s and a Gloria Jeans. The Aldi might do takeaway salads – some do – but it turns out this one doesn’t. They do want to check your backpack thoroughly on the way out though, so now the clock’s even more against you. It’s after two, the spectacular Japanese breakfast was a while ago and you have a plane to catch. So you drive, and you’ll figure it out along the way.

You have 5 minutes to stop and buy food, but not 10 to stop and eat it. A BP servo appears. You pick up a chilli chicken rap – 3 of your 5 minutes is allocated to the toasting of the wrap – and your publicist buys a bag of chips for later, since she’ll be at the wheel. It didn’t seem plausible that you could feel even slightly like a diva because of a chilli chicken wrap from a BP servo, but you do, because only one of you gets to eat something resembling a meal, and the tour code says it’s you. And, all credit to the BP servo, the wrap’s pretty tasty.

DINNER – SKY INDIAN RESTAURANT, AUCHENFLOWER, BRISBANE
You get to the airport with minutes to spare, only to discover your departure’s delayed 15 minutes and then 25. They say there’s a tailwind, so they’ll make most of it up in the air. You know they will do that, but still just miss their slot and therefore do several laps of Brisbane before landing, thereby negating any advantage from the tailwind. You are half an hour late off the plane. The big family dinner started 40 minutes before. You knew you’d be late, but hoped you’d miss the ordering rather than the food.

Everyone’s finished when you get there, but the staff microwave a plate of food that’s thoughtfully been set aside for you. Your family waits patiently while you shove it down. It’s ten minutes in a parallel universe. They’re up to post-meal chat, you’ve just got your plate. You’re a table of one who has just arrived, co-located with a table of 10 who will soon be leaving. There’s a half-glass of wine left in a nearby bottle and 1cm of water in a jug, so you claim them both.

And that, in one day’s meals, is the book tour. Luxury, expediency and dislocation. Sure, there’s the job going on as well (interviews, events, bookstores, meeting people who actually like your work …), but the life of the book tour takes up the time around it.

Years ago, I’d fantasised about the book tour and what it would be like. The fantasy is precisely true, for a smallish percentage of the time. As high a percentage as the publicist can manage, but the itinerary doesn’t make it easy. So each day swings between five-star and ‘would you like unleaded with that?’ and stumbling back in late to family life.

But the problems are all first-world problems, I realise, and the Japanese breakfast was real and, yes, Sofitel on Collins, I’d be happy to say it couldn’t really have been better. And authors have imaginations. In the author’s mind, that can be the whole tour and the author a comfortably-dressed emperor gliding through it from one spectacular meal, one top-hatted concierge, to the next.

At one level, just about every author is a wannabe rockstar, and these are the fleeting moments when we can tell ourselves it’s true. Even if the rockstars trash the room, and we leave it barely untidy, putting some vaguely undesirable character in there later when the room finds its way into our fiction. Some misanthrope or narcissist, getting big big ideas about themselves on account of a well-made breakfast.

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